Resource Guides: History: HTY 105: World Civilizations II Prehistory to 1500

Librarian's Note: HTY 105

The links on this page are intended for use by students in Robert Bernheim's course, HTY 105: World Civilizations I. In addition you may find many resources online via OneSearch or the URSUS library catalog. If you want to browse the library shelves in-person, try the following book sections:

D: World History and the History of Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
E: History of the Americas
F: Local History of the Americas
G: Geography, Anthropology, and Recreation

Reference and Instruction Librarian

Donna Maher

Email Me

Contact:

207-621-3161

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window Academic Search Complete is a large scholarly, multidisciplinary, full-text database, with more than 7,400 full-text periodicals, including more than 6,300 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 11,500 scholarly, popular, trade, and special interest serials, and a total of more than 12,000 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, and more. Updated daily.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Use for good overview material.
Religion and Philosophy Collection This link opens in a new window Religion & Philosophy Collection features a selection of more than 200 magazines and academic journals--everything from Anglican Journal to Zygon--covering religion and the related areas of philosophy and anthropology. Researchers can use this database not only to study theological approaches to social issues, but also to learn about the impact that religion has had on culture throughout history, including literature, arts, and language. Coverage, which includes more than 1.1 million articles updated daily, begins as early as 1980 for indexing and 1983 for periodical full text.
World History Collection This link opens in a new window World History Collection provides access to scholarly journals and magazines useful to both novice historians as well as advanced academic researchers. The database offers balanced coverage of events in world history and scholarly work being established in the field.
National Geographic Kids This link opens in a new window Engage students and broaden their horizons with reputable, authoritative, and age-appropriate content that brings them the world in a way they've never seen it before. Fun and substantive, National Geographic Kids. will take them on amazing adventures in science, nature, culture, archaeology, and space. Fuel your students' natural curiosity with National Geographic Kids. Excite them to learn and dare them to explore more!
Oxford English Dictionary Online This link opens in a new window The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window JSTOR is a digital archive of more than 1,000 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, some dating from the 19th century.
JSTOR's moving wall policy means there is often a gap from 1-5 years between the most recently published issue and the date of the most recent issue available in JSTOR. The University of Maine at Augusta subscribes to Arts & Sciences I, III, VII, VIII, and selected e-books.

You can also search JSTOR through ArtSTOR!

Teacher Reference Center This link opens in a new window Teacher Reference Center is an index of over 260 titles from the most popular teacher and administrator trade journals, periodicals, and books, offered free by EBSCO. This database provides coverage on key education topics such as Assessment, Continuing Education, Current Pedagogical Research, Curriculum Development, Instructional Media, Language Arts, Literacy Standards, Science & Mathematics, and more, for K-12 Teachers & Librarians.
Education Full Text This link opens in a new window Education Full Text, published by H.W. Wilson, provides high-quality indexing and abstracts for an international range of English-language education journals, books, and yearbooks. More than 725 Journals are indexed, cover to cover, going back to 1983. Full text articles are provided for over 350 journals going back to 1996. ArticleLinker connects to additional full-text articles and points to library holdings in print and microform.
Teaching Channel This link opens in a new window The Teaching Channel’s 1,400+ video library gives students a look into diverse classrooms all over the world. All videos have been carefully vetted by content experts to ensure they showcase current techniques, model best teaching practices, and provide immediate ideas to support student learning. Videos can be sorted by grade-level, subject area, or topic.
Educator's Reference Complete This link opens in a new window This collection of more than 1,100 periodicals and 200 reports is a great resource for any educator--from the school teacher and administrator to those studying in the field at the collegiate and graduate level. Educator's Reference Complete seeks to provide full text for titles in the Eric database and covers multiple levels of education from preschool to college, and every educational specialty--such as technology, bilingual education, health education, and testing. It also provides insight on issues in administration, funding, and policy.

Links and Open Educational Resources

LINKS: Digital Resources
OERs

CDRI: Digital Resources for the Study of Religion "The Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative of the American Theological Library Association and Association of Theological Schools is a repository of digital resources contributed by member libraries."
National Geographic: Prehistoric World History on NatGeo.
The Global Religious Landscape PEW Research Center "Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion."

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, scholarly learning tools made available on the web for education. OER also stands in as a name for the movement of scholars working toward making published knowledge more freely accessible without sacrificing quality or academic rigor. Some OER in World History, Ancient History, and History are:

OER Commons: Resources in Ancient History
OER Commons: Resources in World History
OER Commons: Textbooks in World History
Open Textbook Library: Textbooks in History
Open Textbook Library: Textbooks in the Social Sciences
Internet History Sourcebooks Project Welcome to The Internet History Sourcebooks Project, a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use. Primary sources are available here primarily for use in high-school and university/college courses. From the outset the site took a very broad view of the sources that should be available to students and as well as documents long associated with a "western civilization" approach to history also provides much information on Byzantine, Islamic, Jewish, Indian, East Asian, and African history. You will also find many documents especially relevant to women's history and LGBT studies.

Maps/Cartography

Maps
Cartography

The GeaCron Project The GeaCron Project is a customizable geo-temporal database for historical research. Use the map to investigate known countries, states, nation states, ethnic groupings, and other named partitions of the geographic world through history.
Old Maps Online Search engine for historical maps.
Mapping Past Societies - formerly Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (DARMC) "The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds."
Bunting's World Map World design based on Bunting's hometown, in the medieval tradition of placing Jerusalem at the center. About Bunting's map: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/87-the-whole-world-in-a-cloverleaf
Mapping History "Interactive & animated representations of fundamental historical problems and/or illustrations of historical events" across the globe.
Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection: Historical Maps eg., "Historical Atlas," by William R Shepherd (1923): https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/history_shepherd_1923.html. Digitized images of Shepherd's historical atlas at the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection, UT Austin.
Histography Histography is "an interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events."
MAP of Ancient History Museums "Below you can find a map of museums of ancient history as well as important archaeological sites that you can visit. We're constantly adding to this map, so if you know of a location that should be included, contact us."

RESOURCES: Project: Historical Literacy

Background:

Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) The Stanford History Education Group is an award-winning research and development group that comprises Stanford faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, and visiting scholars. SHEG seeks to improve education by conducting research, working with school districts, and reaching directly into classrooms with free materials for teachers and students. SHEG’s Reading Like a Historian curriculum and Beyond the Bubble assessments have been downloaded more than 9 million times. SHEG's current work focuses on how young people evaluate online content. SHEG has created a Civic Online Reasoning curriculum to help students develop the skills needed to navigate our current digital landscape.
Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning Over the last year and a half, the Stanford History Education Group has prototyped, field tested, and validated a bank of assessments that tap civic online reasoning—the ability to judge the credibility of information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computers. Between January 2015 and June 2016, we administered 56 tasks to students across 12 states. In total, we collected and analyzed 7,804 student responses. Our sites for field testing included under-resourced, inner-city schools in Los Angeles and well-resourced schools in suburbs outside of Minneapolis. Our college assessments, which focused on open web searches, were administered online at six different universities that ranged from Stanford, an institution that rejects 94% of its applicants, to large state universities that admit the majority of students who apply. In what follows, we provide an overview of what we learned and sketch paths our future work might take. We end by providing samples of our assessments of civic online reasoning.
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) U.S. history assessment The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) U.S. history assessment is designed to measure students’ knowledge of U.S. history in the context of democracy, culture, technological and economic changes. The most recent U.S. history assessment was given in 2018 to approximately 16,400 students in grade 8.
American History Literacy Survey 2012 Again, the results are troubling. Less than half of the college graduates surveyed could identify George Washington as the general at Yorktown. Only 20% could identify the “Father of the Constitution.” Less than half of college graduates surveyed could identify the war in which the Battle of the Bulge occurred. Only 17% knew the source of the phrase, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
History Literacy Failing Among American Students, Study Faults Colleges Lack Of Core Subject Requirements (SLIDESHOW) A recent study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni titled “What Will They Learn?” graded 1,070 colleges and universities on the strength of their general education curriculum — as determined by the number of core subjects outside a major they require students to take in order to graduate. Those seven core subjects include composition, U.S. government or history, economics, literature, college-level math, science and intermediate-level foreign language.

Resources

History and Civics Test Scores are Dropping - New York Times May 2023
Mervosh, Sarah. 2023. "History and Civics Test Scores are Dropping: [National Desk]." New York Times, May 04. https://library.umaine.edu/auth/EZproxy/test/authej.asp?url=https://search.proquest.com/newspapers/history-civics-test-scores-are-dropping/docview/2808814771/se-2.
What is Historical Literacy? We need a concept of historical literacy to enable us to tell others, and perhaps, more importantly to remind ourselves, what is central to history education,”
Promoting Historical Thinking and Critical Literacy through Historical Challenges The VH 2.0 was designed to engage students in their own learning of history, to assist them in developing historical thinking competencies. It proposes an innovative approach for the transfer of learning and the application of knowledge through inquiry-based activities known as "historical challenges".
The right way to teach history History matters, but you couldn’t tell by the way it is taught in many schools. Here Marion Brady, a classroom teacher for years, talks about the problem, and the solution.
Why Study History? Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?
Should history be taught in schools? Archive of debate.org discussion
Decline and Fall of Teaching History If knowledge of the past is in fact relevant to our ability to understand the present and to exercise freedom of mind - as totalitarian societies, both real and fictional, acknowledge by stringently controlling what may be studied or published -then there is cause for concern about many Americans' sense of history.
The Problem With History Classes Single-perspective narratives do students a gross disservice.

Project Suggestions:

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences
from Dr. Bernheim
10 creative alternatives to research reports and papers Research reports and papers have been around a long time. They haven’t evolved much. Here are 10 ways to make them more relevant.
Thinglink Create unique experiences with interactive images, videos & 360° media
UL Lafayette Library 360 virtual tour (Thinglink)
40 Alternative Assessment Ideas for Learning When people think of assessment, pencils and bubble sheets may be the first things that come to mind. Assessment does not always have to involve paper and pencil but can instead be a project, an observation, or a task that shows a student has learned the material. In the end, all we really want to know is that the skill was mastered, right? Why not make it fun and engaging for students as well?
Dipsticks: Efficient Ways to Check for Understanding
Edutopia

BOOKS: Prehistory to 1500

Architects of World History by Kenneth R. Curtis (Editor); Jerry H. Bentley (Editor)
ISBN: 9781118294833
Publication Date: 2014-02-05
Europe and the Islamic World by John L. Esposito (Other); John Tolan; Henry Laurens; Gilles Veinstein
ISBN: 9781400844753
Publication Date: 2012-11-25

History